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I'm sorry I didn't get to hear your rap song today
My car was on fumes and I came to a station that would accept my plastic
I had to switch off the ignition so I could unlock the fuel cap
And that meant your would-be driveway moment wasn't gonna pass
I'll try to turn you all back on as fast as I could
The car's tank only holds about ten gallons...

But you're gone, and the radio already moved on to the next number on the playlist
And the deejay's left for the wings so I won't know what I've missed
I'm back on the street--that main drag pointed at the heart of town
Disgusted with the tune that replaced you so I turn the radio down
This errand is taking forever
I want to pull over
But I never do

That place I thought would never go away is gone
They've torn down the building and workmen are clearing out the rubble
Will it sit empty for ten years, or are they going to put something new there in a month
I don't know who to ask who would know or care
It's just a shock, though
I guess it will pass

This town just seems to have all the wrong businesses
Though I have no idea what the right ones could be
Stay here too long and you'll just want to move on to the next one
But the next town over is pretty much the same
And so's the one after that...and the one after that...
So why bother?
Where can you go from here?

That shopping center is an eyesore--the whole place is run down
They're replacing the old cheap supermarket with a cheaper one
So half the tenants that were there are closing or moving
The only place that seems to want to stay is a chain that has seven other locations here
Which makes no sense
They can't afford to do that

Yeah, my plan on leaving the house included that store downtown
But I changed my mind because I've had enough of messing with this traffic
If that traffic light had changed just a little earlier, before I committed
I could have taken that highway out through Baneberry
Now I have no choice
Back the way I came

December here only has one kind of weather
And the word for that kind of weather is "bleak"
It's bleak when it's cloudy because it never is cold enough for the snow lovers
It's bleak when it's sunny because the wind smacks down the sun lovers
There isn't even anything to satisfy the haters
So it's best just to be indifferent and give up caring

They won't play another rap song on the station I'm listening to
Because it's the wrong time of year
And they need to play something very long for a staff meeting
The deejay won't be back for at least thirty minutes
So I just shut it off
This car will be back in its carport before he returns...
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Radiolab did a very good program on Artificial Intelligence; I heard it overday.

As I'm sure I said before, there is little in the way of problems that an AI could solve better than a human being as yet. Tho' I was thinking of one possibility.

Suppose a Cleverbot-variety AI were to go through your existing canon of social media output. Every face, space, tweet and blog. Every text, pic and vid. And then it would find "keys" in that content and ask you about them. Perhaps get to to think about why you say what you say. Maybe find your psychological or social "blind spots" and help you work through them.
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...You're listening to the local public radio station, and there's a clarinet quartet on--and you want them to play "Freebird"!
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Fresh Air is my favorite talk show. As far as the subject matter?--Probably a lot about my illustrious family, some about Chillin' Out, some about Moonshine, and likely some about the general frustration and desperation of life on the barren fringes of the modern world.
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Andy Rooney On E-Books.

Andrei Codrescu On E-Books.

I think if any man could ever replace Andy on 60 Minutes, Andrei can.
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I was reminded of it by a post from the Top Gear fan page on Facebook.
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The radio in my car is all I got. No videos.
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Today, Daniel Berry retires from the Knoxville Public Radio station WUOT-FM. Last night was his last broadcast of Echoes Of A Golden Age; today was his last Morning Concert show. I don't know how the town's upper crust will get along without hearing "La Danza" at the crack of 9AM weekdays, or that ancient recording of the overture to Il Pagliacci once a week. Daniel seemed to have more fun than anybody in any form of mass media--more than both the brothers on Car Talk if you can believe it.

I wasn't a big fan of classical music, and I'm still not much of one...but I'm going to miss him, and I can't imagine how the station could fill his chair.
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Talking To Myself... )
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James Murphy On NPR's Fresh Air Today. No, I had no idea who he is before...tho' I had in fact heard a few of his songs.

He says some things (not in the text on the page now) that I find very applicable to my Uncool Kid project.
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The possiblity of telling a joke that is funny only to the person telling the joke.

But what's interesting/strange/weird is that all of a sudden opportunities are coming up out of thin air and promise great things. It may not necessarily be funny, but it is unheard of.
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Karl Jenkins' Requiem.

No more needs to be said on this subject.
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This NPR Interview is about how Hollywood's business model has morphed with the downfall of Box Office and physical home video product (tapes & DVDs).

As [profile] ps238principal noted earlier this week, Hollywood is making more Reboots and Sequels than ever, proving that even more important than a successful movie is to a studio is the brand that it generates. Original ideas are far riskier and difficult to market than known quantities, no matter who is cast in the central roles on screen, who writes the script, who directs, etc.
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I really could have stayed another week in Florida, but I got enough of the things on my list done and all the people who matter most to me. Darn it, if America had actual passenger trains running I'd shuttle between here and there all the time.

* "And I'm Never Going Back To My Old School..." As said earlier, on St. Patrick's Day a high school classmate had invited me and my brother to a party at an Irish/Sports bar. Going was a necessary mistake. The music was way too loud to carry on conversations. We found our "party" but beyond two or three people we didn't "mingle" and while I thought I recognized one woman--I didn't want to talk to her. The truth came to me that if I really wanted to socialize with my classmates in school, I would have. These days there is no meaning attaching me to this crowd. All of a sudden I feel okay with having been shunned and flunked. I just didn't fit in.

* Too many of the people I know are now attached to oxygen apparati. If you smoke, quit. If you don't smoke, don't start.

* I will never again go in a Disney store. Mike dragged me in one so he could look at Princess figures. They'd never hire me, but I bet working there would drive a lot of people insane.

* I will probably swear off eating more than one meal a day at a restaurant. Not so much the expense, or necessarily the food...just the stress is enough.

* Q-105 is back. The Tampa station is now Sixties/Seventies/Eighties oldies rather than baseline Top 40, but they haven't lost the style that made us fans for so long.

* I decided to not be the Lipinski Proxy this time. Dana's fantasy baseball league is down to five participants so their draft today will probably run a lot quicker even without my assistance.

* Atlanta's highways are bedlam. Both ways we had trouble with crowds and volume slowdowns. Dunno what route I'll take next time tho'.
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The local NPR station produces a music history program called Echoes Of The Golden Age, and tonight's show was about drinking songs in opera. So that concept sparked a discussion between myself and Mum about her knowledge of drinking songs, and she told me a story...

...Back in college she took German langauge and for her second year, her teacher was an actual German woman (as opposed to a science teacher who had taken the job the previous year by default). Well, after one particular class, as everybody was leaving the classroom, some of the class cut-ups were serenading everybody else with a drinking song they had made up in German, and Mum recalled how funny the German teacher thought it was. Teenage boys who had never set foot in Germany making up a German drinking song about the Rhine River.

And then I told her that because of all those American soldiers being stationed in West Germany over the course of the Cold War, country & western music is relatively popular in Germany even today...and there are probably German kids writing songs in English about American landmarks.

History works both ways.
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1) An interesting discussion on the Shortpacked! official board has been about the fact that the Diamond Distributor company uses the Batman standard to judge title sales. That is, every title they sell is compared to how well it does against the specific DC comic book titled Batman. One of the readers has suddenly made it his mission to create a comic book and attempt to sell a CentiBatman's worth of copies of it. (As the value of a Batman in copies is somewhat variable there is some luck involved.)

2) News relayed to me by Aaron [livejournal.com profile] ps238principal Williams that a British court ruled against Lucasfilm in a copyright case involving the Imperial StormTrooper costume from Star Wars. The judge had declared that the costume was "industrial design" rather than "scuplture" under the legal definitions (the copyright on it had run its course) and become public domain. My immediate thought was on the status of car design--whether the motorcars built before 1995 were suddenly made public domain by this ruling.

3) There are only six or so songs left to vend in my quota for Dread & Terror.

4) All of a sudden somebody is following my LJ via Blogged. I'm supposed to have a Widget working to tell me more about that as part of the LJ, but I haven't figured out how and where to put it up. Welcome, Kikuko...hope you are comfortable here.

5) According to the Japanese site www.saiani.net, the game Armored Core will have an OAV spinoff released sometime in 2010. I'll be watching for this in my usual around-the-blinders fashion.

6) Jon Bon Jovi was on Fresh Air yesterday. He says he absolutely hated the music videos his band made back in the Eighties. I wonder what the boys would have done if they had more creative control back then.

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Stephen R Bierce

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